From Founding Fluence to Gigawatt Projects in Saudi Arabia | Marek Kubik

People:


Marek's LinkedIn
Max' LinkedIn


Keywords: BESS, Fluence, Sodium-Ion, Saudi
Arabia, Energy Transition


Summary:


Marek Kubik was part of the founding team of Fluence, one of the
biggest BESS companies in the world, and has been in grid-scale
storage since 2009, for practically as long as the industry
itself has existed. His journey started at AES, where he
delivered one of the world's first commercial battery projects at
a coal power station in Northern Ireland, before scaling Fluence
from a small Amsterdam office through hypergrowth to its Nasdaq
IPO. Today he is building renewable mega-projects in Saudi
Arabia.


In this episode of "BESSt of BESS" we talk about why the first
grid-scale batteries had nothing to do with renewables, and how
ancillary services, pioneering showroom projects and regulatory
groundwork turned BESS into a commercial business. Marek also
weighs in on how quickly sodium-ion will really become
cost-competitive, why Europe may already have lost the battery
manufacturing race to China and the US, and how Saudi Arabia went
from zero to 18 GWh of grid-connected BESS in a single year.